Chemical Alphabet - Smell All About It

Like all good mysteries, it is hidden in plain sight.

It has, if anything, deepened as our knowledge of smell has increased.

Like most enticing enigmas, it is simply stated:



what is this chemical alphabet that our noses read so effortlessly from birth?

 – Luca Turn


illustration: Alphabet Stew Lura Astor

Chemical Poetry

Perfumes are chemical poems.

Smell is our chemical sense.

-    Luca Turin



Illustration: Sprifff Lura Astor

food writer goes perfume shopping

Corby Kummer,
food writer,
goes perfume shopping
with
Luca Turin


read here from Technology Review/MIT



photo: Felix Fernandez Penny more here

The Nature of the Sense of Smell

This Friday & Saturday you can enjoy special events with Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez, Patricia de Nicolai at the Smithsonian in DC.
info here

Here, WonderMonger introduces Dr. Turin at the University of Alaska Southeast. Grab the popcorn, it's a bit over one hour, and fun.

5 & 6 February 2010 Smithsonian Washington DC

in collaboration with the Embassy of France in Washington DC

Two Aromatic Events
with Luca Turin
Tania Sanchez
Patricia de Nicolaï

reservations required

ticket includes the book Perfumes: The Guide, bevvies, and gift bag from Bloomies

The Art of Fragrance
Friday 5 February 2010
6:45 PM
$25 members, $40 general admission
click here for Friday ticket information

Perfumes: An Exquisite Exploration
Saturday 6 February 2010
10 AM - 1 PM
$125 members, $150 general admission
here for Saturday ticket information

Embassy of France - Auditorium
4101 Reservoir Road, NW
Washington, DC
Business Attire & Photo ID required

Friday's lecture, with scented examples, discusses enjoying fragrance, chemical breakthroughs that make modern perfumery possible, and the still-a-mystery how do our noses figure it all out?

Saturday, you get to smell new scents, natural and synthetic raw materials, and You Lucky Duckies !!! masterworks that have been unavailable for decades, courtesy of a rare collection from the Versailles’ Osmotheque, International Conservatory of Perfumes.

Perfumer Patricia de Nicolaï is director of the Osmotheque, founder of Parfums de Nicolaï, and author of Once Upon a Time... Perfume.

Luca Turin, biophysicist at MIT, author of The Secret of Scent, founder/CTO of Flexitral - an odorant molecule design company; Seen on TED and BBC regarding how the sense of smell works; Co-author of Perfumes: The Guide,
with Tania Sanchez, who publishes on the topic of perfumes.

Books & authors available for signing! Report back.

Related links to right under Feed Your Inspiration.

photo: French Embassy in Washington DC

sugar plum fairies

Memories flood on the shores of my present with bottles upon bottles of water-blurred messages, driftwood memories, tattered nets of snagged dreams, crushed shell that twinkles like star sillage.

With my off-strip Las Vegas company throughout the 1980's, The Tai Chi Comedy Performers, we used comedy to push the envelope in every medium available to us. They told us comedy was dead, unless you were Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor. Not so, we said.

Our opera singer was Carmen Ghia.
A kid with a gimp leg ran away like a graceful gazelle from a naughty Santa who chased him after he angelically sang I Saw Mother Kissing Santa Claus. "I'm going to get you," threatened Santa.

I danced classical ballet choreography to Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies with the addition of a star-shaped, magic wand and proceeded to a raucous change in dance theatrics and finale in The Good Fairy Gets Down.

Director of Ballet Etudes Repertory Company/BERC in Connecticut, Russell Fratto, (r.i.p. Russell I still hear you screaming Smile! Smile! as our toes screamed from rehearsal heat) braved a Christmas season sans The Nutcracker Suite in the late 1960's, with an ambitious, and excellent, program of variations from a huge range of ballet repertoire.

He, his company, lost money. Lesson learned, every year end holiday saved the year's budget with the in/famous Nutcracker Suite from then on. End of story. A real nut cracker.

Back in Las Vegas, despite our shoestring budget, we had some of the best lighting designers on the Las Vegas Strip working with us; a singer and piano talent that Liberace last introduced to Caesar's Palace and his own Museum, High Tea and Piano Bar; a Michael Jackson look alike didn't last two shows, he disappeared to Los Angeles after night one. Some years later, my friend Willie Collins gained permission from the Liberace estate to get the showman's dentures imprint, for Willie was/is the consummate Liberace impersonator (he was the above mentioned Santa.)

I was fortunate to see masterful showmen and showwomen in live performance. True to form, they gave me goosebumps and tears simultaneously for just be so damneddamned good.

Sitting next a top spot follower high above a major showroom stage, he told me subtle differences he did when a star and he connected, to really funnel the star shine. Creating magic intensity, magic moment to magic moment ...

Sequoia sang and danced her Tina impersonations. Within the year, Tina was back singing and shimmying those same songs, breaking her silence, Proud Mary Keep On Rollin' ...

Alfredo Gustar, aka the "Suntan Fred Astaire" and Maceo Anderson of the Step Brothers hoofed and spoofed. Tap tap tap, smash, "damn cockroaches". Maceo and the 4 Step Brothers got their Hollywood Walk star finally, 15 years after our last show together.

We mixed it up, all colors, people who'd been blacklisted off the main stages (one for a jealous husband who had smashed cameras in a television studio - but, that was almost the norm in Las Vegas, back then).

Yours truly, choreographed, MC'd, dance, sang, directed, took the oldtimers to doctors, worked fulltime and a half to support the shows, wrote skits, talent scouted, created graphics, saw the video my Tai Chi students took and the lawyer stealing from the ticket box, on the one show that I knew was the turning point after years of work, all to help support his cocaine habit and I cried, Uncle. Bye bye. The hat hung, the shoes undone, climbed off that huge climb, la precipice, off the stage and have been climbing and falling ever since.

I proceeded to take the characters I see, while I dream music, lights, sound, make-up!, the knowledge from the vantage point of theater wings and empty seats in audience caverns, drafty theaters new and old, writing, writing to make sense of the non-theatrical whirled, and, I tell you this,

thank goodness for Chandler Burr's book The Emperor of Scent, for Luca Turin's writing, for bibliographies and online communications of things fragrant that open/ed up before me faster than Ali Baba could say Open Sesame! magico presto digito

for

My continued fall became graceful again

Q: Did you fall on purpose, or was that choreographed?

LA/A: No, no, so&so put water on the stage where I do that tricky bit. I landed on my knee and fell, then rolled out and up.

Q: It was so graceful, I couldn't tell.

Me: Good thing for Tai Chi ... at least it wasn't the invisible cigarette cellophane wrap at the top of the stairs at the (major casino showroom) that so & so took ... the understudy's method of winning the role.

The Language of Smell

allows me to chase the sillage
further down the rabbit hole
a life long,
long, long chase,
an olfactory hunt,
of play and mischief
stringing together picas
to help others understand

the sublime, the irritable (pearl makers),
the ecstatic, mundane and cool of
the smelly world

thanks to all those I meet along the way ...
the Mad Hatters, Caterpillars, Butterflies, Queens and more.


Illustration: Noteflakes Lura Astor

excerpt from book I'm writing and writing and writing
and, for those who ask about my multi-media performing

winter's solstice is almost here

Cold things
have little smell,
and one of the attractions
of a snowy night
is the total blank
our nose perceives.


~ Luca TurinThe Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell
 





But flowers distilled,
though they
with winter meet,Leese but
their show;
their substance
still lives sweet.

~ William Shakespeare

Sonnet 5
Those hours that with gentle work did frameThe lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very sameAnd that unfair which fairly doth excel.
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Then were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show;
their substance still lives sweet.~ William Shakespeare

I love juxtapositions of spritzing spring/summer
in the dark of winter,
notes held captive in glass reveal their stories of light and season.
In bright of summer, putting on a cool, sharp winter plays with the senses.

The perfumers' art amuses
and for this
I thank them, heartily, joyfully.

photo: Lurana author in 1967 or '68
part of a photoseries/art poem
for an art project to a Ferlinghetti poem
Pound Ridge Tree Reservation, Connecticut

Congratulations & Shout oUts 2

to Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
for their updated book
now available in paperbackPerfumes: The Guide A-Z

Check out the reviews here
about the authors here
  There is a growing platform for perfume criticism much the same way Siskel & Ebert & Roeper gave us their version of film criticism and a serious, long lasting, platform including guest critics.
In Living Color gave us movie critic send-ups with Men on Film - the manly or bitchy Loved It, Hated It, tell it like it is, 2 snaps and a rewind ratings with David Alan Grier, who now has his Chocolate News, and Keenen Ivory Wayans.

If you have problems with the art of dish and homoerotica do not open this link  as Men on Film cover the films Grease, Psycho, 48 Hours and more.

While I in no way agree with each of the final (that is, standing in print) pronouncements on the fragrances within Perfumes: The Guide A-Z, who cares? The Guide allows readers to stick to their opinions, gain more facts in the process, learn more of perfumers, houses, recipe changes and other lore, perhaps change an opinion or way of smelling/revisiting particular fragrances. Remember, perfume lovers are nothing if not opinionated.
 
This book is

So entertaining, you don’t even have to like perfume - The Denver Post
 
A wake-up call for the nostrils -The Independent (UK)

Bigoted, snarling, monomaniacal, subjective, triumphalist, and quite magnificent
 - Prospect (UK) 

As if a light has been switched on in a murky room - Philip Hensher, author The Northern Clemency

Illustration: The Two Snifftateers: ©Lura Astor
part of Perfume Series

on the air

our noses

keep reading the air

 - Luca Turin,  
The Secret of Scent
...the beautiful landscape of smell 


Sunday Telegraph review of The Secret of Scent

"One needs better metaphors."

I know a huge number of disparate facts.

My gift is my quiet ability to weave them together, synthesize them, create a tale, tidy them up so as to be presentable.

Luca Turin:

"Metaphor is the
currency of knowledge.
... one needs 
better metaphors."

For interdisciplinarians, metaphors as a tool create language bridges, make cultural and sensory synapses, make knowledge more accessible to others, cross-translate languages of the senses.












 

Illustrations: Lura Astor